


The Coupon

by waffleguppies



Category: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Shaiman/Shaiman & Wittman/Greig
Genre: Completely Normal Ordinary Shopkeeper, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:20:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24453571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waffleguppies/pseuds/waffleguppies
Summary: The night before her son's eleventh birthday, Sarah Bucket stops by the candy shop for Charlie's present. Another one-shot, based on the Broadway version.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 24





	The Coupon

When Sarah Bucket turned the corner into her street, she was relieved to see the candy shop was still open. As she hurried past the pawnbroker’s, all the watches and clocks in the smeary window showed some permutation of several minutes to six. It was true night already, black and starless, and half the shops along the street were already locked and shuttered up tight. In this bitter winter weather, with sleet driving from the sky like a barrage of tiny darts, nobody wanted to stay at work a minute longer than they had to.

It had been a full day’s shift at the laundry, and another half-one at the dry-cleaners’ right before that. Leaving work, Sarah had been almost too tired to think straight, but the long, chilly walk home had woken her up. Her feet were killing her and her hands were leaden cold, balled up in her cardigan pockets, and there was a tight steeled knot in her stomach that was half hunger and half nerves. If she didn’t think about it too hard, she could tell herself the feeling was a sort of determination, and that was good. She suspected she would need it.

She hurried up the candy shop’s single worn step and pushed through the door under the jangling bell. It was warm as toast inside, in stark contrast to the wet, icy street, and she could smell the papery burned-dust scent of an old storage heater blowing out heat somewhere under the sugar-cloud of candy and chocolate that filled the room. A radio was playing from somewhere in the back, tuned slightly off-station, a faint murmur of static and big-band jazz.

The shopkeeper was halfway up the twisting staircase that led up to the next floor, dusting a row of jars in the highest shelf of the window. He came down a step as she walked in, stowing the duster in his coat as he glanced her way.

“Close to the wire,” he observed, checking his watch. “I was just about to shut up shop.”

“Yes, I’m sorry, I won’t be a minute,” said Sarah, automatically, making a beeline for the display of classic Wonka bars by the register.

“Looking for something in particular?”

Sarah hesitated. “A... Whipplescrumptious Fudgemallow Delight.”

She knew the name perfectly well, of course. It had always been Charlie’s undisputed favorite, and he’d spun her enough panegyrics on the subject for her to have it by heart. It was just difficult for her to say such an unnecessarily convoluted, childishly indulgent phrase out loud, without the conviction that she sounded ridiculous. She had to tell herself that she had no reason to feel daft, especially since she was speaking to a man who sold Wonka confectionery for a living, and presumably spent all day saying things like ‘Scrumdidlyumptious’ and ‘Triple-Dazzle-Caramel-Snazzle,’ without a shred of self-examination.

He snorted, hopping off the bottom stair and crossing the floor after her. He was quite lanky, in his neat knit sweatervest and crumpled check shop-coat that looked suspiciously as if he’d been using the tail of it to dust things with. His glasses were thick and rather dated, with heavy tortoiseshell frames, and as he lifted up the hinged part of the counter to let himself through, she noticed with her quick haberdasher’s eye that his shoes were old but very, very well-made.

“Well, you and everyone else in town,” he said. As she approached the display stand, he motioned towards it, a curt, faintly sarcastic invitation. “Good luck!”

She could see what he meant. The entire shop had a dishevelled, scavenged air. A lot of the shelves and jars were almost or completely empty. A heaped trash pile of boxes and packaging lay stacked at the side of the counter, a broom leaning across the whole mess. All fallout from the big contest, no doubt- it was probably as much as most candy retailers could do to just keep up with the crazy demand.

This particular Wonka franchise had certainly opened up at the best possible moment. The shop had originally been a tobacconists, and it had been standing empty for more than a year, a drab dark gap in the street. Then, all of a sudden, just a few weeks ago, it had lit up overnight like a hundred-year flower, scrubbed and polished and sporting a bright fantastic window display full of Wonka products, the sight and close proximity to which had almost caused Charlie to explode with excitement on the spot. The very next day, the Golden Ticket contest had been announced. The timing was almost spooky.

The madness and panic-buying couldn’t go on for much longer, Sarah supposed, but with only one Golden Ticket left in the world, ‘Wonkamania’ showed no signs of letting up yet. Even this display of classics looked tossed hell to breakfast. She felt a small twist of dismay as she saw that the shelf-space for Fudgemallow Delights was empty, but she realised almost at once that nothing was in its proper place. People had spent the day picking things up and putting them down anywhere there was space, pushing everything else aside to get at what they wanted. There were rogue Toffee Crisps mixed in with the Caramel Snazzles, and Honeycomb Surprise bars shoved right to the back of the Peanut Jelly Nougat Dreams. The whole stand had basically been reduced to a giant pick’n’mix bucket by people’s carelessness.

The shopkeeper had perched himself behind his register. Feeling under the counter, he pulled out a dog-eared copy of _Treasure Island_ that looked as if it had been put through an industrial washing machine.

“Pretty sure there’s one in there somewhere,” he observed, settling down to read.

Sarah armed her damp hair out of her face with her sleeve, and started sorting through the mess, searching in earnest. Despite her best efforts to keep his mind off the contest, Charlie was still spending every minute he could spare hanging around this candy shop, or talking every detail of the whole thing over and over again at home, a bottomless well of _m_ _aybes_ and _w_ _hat ifs_ and _i_ _magines._ As his birthday got nearer and nearer, and the odds got longer and longer, he was being set up for a big enough disappointment as it was. The very least she could do was find him the kind of Wonka bar he wanted.

While her son was almost unbearably excited right from the word go at the prospect of the Golden Tickets, the contest and the tour, any interest Sarah had felt to start with had quickly turned to tired annoyance. She would never have dreamed of saying as much to Charlie, beyond gently trying to warn him against getting his hopes up too high, but she knew darn well that a contest that relied entirely on everyone buying as much candy as possible to boost their chances of winning wasn’t a contest. It was nothing but a lottery, a cynical cash-grab aimed straight at parents’ pockets.

Charlie was so bright, full of a boundless energy and ability to apply himself to the passions that fired his imagination. The things he drew in his scrapbooks almost bewildered her, sometimes, she felt how a common house sparrow might have felt, watching a fantastic little bird of paradise hatching and growing in her dull nest. The contest could have been a candy-bar-designing competition, a story-writing contest, a challenge that asked for _something_ from the winners, some quality other than endless pocket-money or a father who owned half of Siberia.

If it had been a real contest, Sarah couldn’t help feeling that Charlie would have had more than a fair chance. If it had been a real contest, he really could have won.

 _And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride,_ she thought to herself. One of her own father’s favourite sayings, along with his hard-held and oft-broadcast convictions that lotteries were a sucker’s bet and that if you were too open-minded, your brains would fall out. It was pointless to think about what might have been. The contest was what it was, and Charlie had _one_ chance, a chance in a million... if she could just find the darn thing, in this shambles of torn wrappers and scattered bars.

As she hunted, she thought she felt the shopkeeper’s eyes on her- that uncanny feeling that can’t be defined but can almost always be relied upon, the sixth sense of someone else’s attention on the back of one’s neck. When she glanced surreptitiously sideways, however, he was only gazing serenely over the top of his book, up through the window at the Wonka factory clock that overlooked the town from the hill. The position of the hands showed dead on six, although, of course, the nonsensical numerals at that position read four. The message was clear all the same- she needed to hurry up.

Half-kneeling to check the bottom shelf, Sarah heard the shop bell jangle again behind her, the heavy footsteps of another late customer. She gathered her wet skirt and stood up out of the aisle to let them pass by, and just at that moment she spotted the distinctive blue-and-red wrapper of a Fudgemallow Delight poking out of the side of the display, almost right under her nose. She let out a little breath of relief, and reached out for it.

A ruffle of cold air and water droplets and the sudden passage of a large body right in her space, and the man who'd just walked in barged straight in front of her and snatched the candy bar, just before her fingers touched it. Sarah was so taken aback that for a moment or two she could only stare in shock, but he seemed determined to carry the matter off as if he’d done nothing untoward- as if he was the only customer in the shop. He simply turned away from her as if she didn’t exist, and slapped the bar down on the counter, along with a ten-dollar note.

“Sir?” started Sarah. “Excuse me? I was-”

The big man turned round. He had a large tweed scarf bundled up to his throat, and small, unfriendly eyes. He stared down his somewhat purple, sleet-damp nose at her with a look that Sarah knew very well, because usually she was on the other side of a counter from it, explaining to some outraged patron that a twenty-four hour turnaround meant a twenty-four hour turnaround, and if they needed their suit or dress cleaned in time for that evening they needed to pay the expedited service fee. It was the look of a person who knew they were very important, who expected to be deferred to at every turn, taking stock of a weevil who might turn out to be a problematic weevil.

Sarah’s sense of rightful indignation was screaming at her, but the look of total entitlement on the man’s face sent her inner store clerk straight into survival mode, leaving her with a dry mouth, not much breath, and the nasty sense she’d lost the argument before she could even get a word out.

Before she could try to speak, however, there was the sound of a cash-register drawer opening and closing behind the man, who turned back to the counter to find his money still lying where he’d left it, but nothing else. The shopkeeper was sitting on his high stool with his elbows on the edge of the counter, reading his book, apparently oblivious to both of them.

The big man rapped the counter with the edge of his nice leather billfold. “Excuse me. _Excuse_ me!”

“Mmyyes,” hummed the shopkeeper, without looking up.

“Where’s the bar?”

“Oh, there’s a couple in the next street.” The shopkeeper turned a page. “I’d recommend the Angry Rhino... great cocktails.”

“You know what I mean! The Wonka bar, I wanted to buy that!”

“Well, you are in luck, this _is_ an official Wonka franchise!” The shopkeeper folded the corner of his page over to keep his place, and set the book down, smiling at the big man. “What’s your fancy?”

“I- that fudgemallow thing! I put it-”

“Ah, the Whipplescrumptious Fudgemallow Delight! I applaud your taste, sir, but I’m afraid we’re fresh out.” The shopkeeper waved a hand politely at the general disarray. “There’s this contest at the moment, you might have heard of it, unprecedented demand for all Wonka products, and, well, the Whipplescrumptious _is_ our most popular confection. They’re just flying off the shelves.”

“But-”

“I should get more stock in soon. Come back Monday, I’ll be happy to intimidate you.”

“But, I- you _have_ one! I put it right there!!”

The shopkeeper followed the man’s furious finger to the place on the counter where the Fudgemallow Delight had been. “Sir,” he said, calmly, “one of the first things you learn, as a peddler of edible fripperies, is how to tell a chocolate bar from thin air. I can confidently confirm that what we have here, is the latter.”

“You- you put it in your drawer!”

“Now, why in the world would I do that? You think I don’t want to sell my stock?”

“But-”

“Are you quite sure it wasn’t just a pigment of your imagination?”

The shopkeeper raised a solicitous eyebrow. The big man opened and shut his mouth a couple of times, not helping his resemblance to a livid goldfish that had been poured into an expensive overcoat. The shopkeeper glanced at his watch.

“Oh, and I’m so sorry, but we closed at six.”

There was nothing much, in the face of this smiling brick wall, that the big man could do, other than snatch his money and huff and snort his way out of the shop like a dyspeptic bull. He shut the door so hard it caused a small avalanche of toffees in the window, and Sarah watched through the glass as his angry shape shouldered off into the driving sleet.

“You meet such _lovely_ people in this job,” said the shopkeeper. He opened the cash-register and tossed the Fudgemallow bar on the counter. “You wanted this?”

“I- yes!” hurried Sarah. “Thank you, I-”

“Can’t _stand_ people being grabby,” he interrupted, poking at buttons on the register like it was a game of finger-hopscotch. “All day, nothing but grouse, grouse, grouse. Why don’t you have this? Are you sure you’re out of that? Can’t you just check in the back? It’s a five by eight room, what do they think, I’ve got Narnia back there? Then they drop everything where it falls out their hands, completely trash the place, and expect me to clean it all up again so they can do exactly the same thing tomorrow.” He hit the total button with his thumb and looked up at her for the first time. “Three fifty-nine.”

Sarah hurriedly unshouldered her tatty khaki pocketbook. And then, because she honestly just wanted him to know that he’d done something really kind, she said, “I- I’m just really so glad you have one left. It’s actually my son’s-”

“Whoah-whoah-whoah, Tolstoy, I said three fifty-nine, not your life story.”

Sarah flushed a little, but for the most part she was too anxious for what was coming next to be particularly put out. This would be the tricky part.

From the inner pocket of her bag, she fished out a fifty-cent roll of pennies, still in its red-and-tan counter paper, another roll half-filled and folded neatly down, and the larger coins from Joe’s little hoard, mostly tarnished nickels and dimes. She’d counted them out several times, to make absolutely sure there was no mistake. Putting these on the counter next to the candy bar, she took out a neatly-clipped piece of paper, and set it down next to the money.

The shopkeeper was already looking none too happy at the rolls of change, but when he saw the yellowed, fragile-looking paper slip, his eyebrows bounced up like they were sending emergency semaphore to space. He reached over and pinched it between his finger and thumb, holding it up as if it were a stunned rat.

“What in the name of Ghirardelli is this thing?”

“It’s a coupon,” said Sarah. “A dollar off any Wonka product.”

He stared vacantly at her for a moment, then jerked his glasses down his nose with a sharp twitch of his head and flipped the coupon over, squinting at it over the top of the thick frames. The newsprint on the reverse was tight-packed, spidery, a fraction of a masthead and most of the leading column.

“Evening edition… third of April… 1974.”He looked up at her, mouth slightly open, speechless.

“There’s no expiry date,” Sarah said, quickly.

He flipped it over again, this time making a close study of the paragraph of small print under the big, curling letters.

Sarah knew damn well she was right, because she’d been over the whole thing just as carefully herself, to make triple-sure she wasn’t mistaken. She’d stumbled across the coupon in a whole water-stained stack of newspapers she’d found bursting out of a box at the dump- all from the same era, mostly junk periodicals and magazines with a few editions of the local paper thrown in. At first, she’d seen nothing but useful firelighters for the winter, but a careful dig through as she’d dried them out at home had turned up this unexpected treasure. She’d put it aside, planning to give it to Charlie for his scrapbook- he would have loved to add a genuine, vintage Wonka coupon to his collection- but as her son’s eleventh birthday had crept closer, she’d realised she would have to turn it to a more practical use.

She’d made the best of it, clipping the torn corners and ironing it out carefully under a towel at work to get rid of the wrinkles, but she had to admit it still very much looked like what it was- a shabby scrap of newsprint that had been over three decades old before Charlie had even been born.

The shopkeeper laid it back down onto the counter, scrubbing his fingers on the hem of his coat as if he might catch mange.

“Are you _kidding_ me?”

“It says-”

“I can read, thank you, madam.” Pushing his glasses right up into his thinning hair, he put his hand over his face and dragged it downwards. “You people. You people are... _unbelievable._ You just- you just always want-”

He broke off, his jaw tightening as he stared down at the coupon. He seemed to be nodding his head, very slightly, over and over, agreeing with an invisible interlocutor or maybe just plain venting his disgust in an antsy bobbing movement.

“I don’t want to be any trouble-” started Sarah.

“Oh, no, no, no, you just want me to take a forty-three-year-old coupon and eat my profit margin so you can save a dollar,” he snapped. “I don’t know why I’m surprised, I guess no good deed goes unpunished, right?”

“I’m-”

“Hey, but, look! I get ten cents back on handling if I process fifty of these babies. _T_ _here’s_ that silver lining.”

Sarah was quite sure her whole face was burning red. There was absolutely nothing on earth that would have kept her in this humiliating transaction for another second, apart from the fact that Charlie’s birthday present relied on it entirely. She didn’t _have_ three dollars and fifty-nine cents. She had two dollars and fifty-nine cents, and a dollar-off coupon that was perfectly good… if you overlooked it being forty-three years old. However badly she wanted to just throw the bloody candy bar at the man’s head and go home, for Charlie, she was prepared to argue the point to the death.

The shopkeeper seemed to make up his mind. He poked the paper back across the counter at her.

“I’m afraid I can’t take this. Statute of limitations, de facto jurisprudence. Truly sorry, but my hands are tied.”

“All right...” Sarah took a breath. She’d been prepared for this, not that it made it much easier. “This is your shop?”

He jerked his shoulders in something that might have been a bow of acknowledgement, if it hadn’t been so graceless and sulky.

“Then you must have a regional franchise manager. I’d like to speak to them, please.”

He blinked at her. “You’d like to- you want to- _excuse_ me?”

Sarah had a lot of practice, years upon _years_ of practice, in staying calm, polite, and patient under pressure. She nodded, firmly, shoving the embarrassment and the fear that he’d simply kick her out of his shop if she pushed too far, deep down under her determination to get this over and done with.

“I’d like to speak to your RM. I’m sure they’d be interested to hear how you’re refusing to honor valid Wonka brand promotions in good faith.”

There were a few moments in which she wasn’t entirely sure what his face was doing. Several interesting emotions seemed to be battling for control of it.

“You- you- _really?_ Over a _dollar?”_

“Yes,” insisted Sarah, desperately. “Call them, please. I can wait.”

They stared at each other, stonewalled, the candy bar lying on the counter between them. Sarah tried, as hard as she possibly could, to project stubborn unbudging entitlement from every nerve, send it sizzling through her stare, to look like she intended to stand in this shop come hell and high water until she got her way. God knows, she should have had enough material to draw on- she saw enough of exactly the same sort of behaviour every day at work. She didn’t have the faintest clue how people did it so effortlessly. Probably, it was something to do with the fact that ninety percent of the time people decided to cause a scene, they only had to contend with people like her, people who were too scared or powerless in their position or just plain tired to do anything but give in.

It had to be once in a blue moon, when the sort of people who threw tantrums at shop clerks and wait staff would run into somebody like this man. This equally pig-headed individual, with his self-satisfied wordplay and his shoes that probably cost more than she earned in five years, who looked like he might be about to have an aneurysm at her sheer cheek.

Sarah, on the other hand, was not the sort of person to whom this kind of bluff came naturally. She was sweating under her hat, and if there had been anything in her stomach she would probably have felt like being sick.

The silence went on for a horribly long time. Something had to give, and at last, to Sarah’s immense relief, he buckled.

He tipped his head so far towards the ceiling that she wondered how his glasses didn’t fall off the back of his head, and let out a great big long _“Uuuuuuuuuuugh”_ that deflated his entire body like an old tyre, leaving him hunched over the register with his very sullen face squeezed between his hands. In defeat, he looked less like an adult, and more like a kid being forced to eat his vegetables.

She almost felt like laughing, until he looked up at her again. The look he gave her then, his eyes blank and tired behind his glasses, seemed to sum her up from head to toe, and to see everything in her that was mean and shabby and contemptible.

“All right, madam,” he said, listlessly. “You win. Any other vouchers, while we’re at it? Anything carved in runes? You got a cave painting you think might be good for a couple more cents?”

“No,” said Sarah, quietly. “Just that, thank you.”

“How'm I even supposed to put this damn thing through?” he muttered, staring down at the rows of keys. Sarah cleared her throat.

“Oh, I- I’ve actually used that sort of till before,” she said, awkwardly. “It’s- it’s just the pink key at the top there, the one that says ‘Promos,’ and then you-”

“Ah-ah-ah!” he barked, batting at her hand as she tried to point. He was nowhere near her, so it only looked as if he was trying to swat away an invisible bee. “No backseat drivers, thank you _so_ much! I can manage!”

For someone who could manage, he certainly spent long enough doing it, poking numbers and sub-totals and voiding the whole thing and starting over at least twice, printing out a whole ream of waste receipt papers, and glaring daggers at the new total when it finally popped up.

 _“Two_ fifty-nine.” He set both hands around her heap of change and pulled it across the counter. She stood there while he counted the pennies, the nickels and dimes, taking twice as long about it as she felt anybody reasonably should. Eventually he swept the whole lot into his register drawer, coupon and all, and closed it sharply.

“You need a receipt?”

“No, thank you,” said Sarah. She probably should have felt some sense of victory or triumph as she picked up the candy bar, but she just felt tired and angry and humiliated.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” he said, through a fixed smile, in the same way someone else might have said ‘Please go and boil your head.’ Sarah didn’t have the energy to respond. With a tight little nothing-smile of her own, she tucked the precious candy bar deep into her pocketbook and turned to go.

“Sorry if I was rude,” he said, casually, from behind her.

Almost at the door, she stopped.

“A little brusque? Tad out of line?” He clicked his tongue. “It’s been a crazy few weeks, you know? Four out of five Golden Tickets found, seems like everyone’s losing their marbles over these things. Nothing brings out the worst in people like the chance of a lifetime.” He had parked himself up on his stool again, and as she turned to look at him he flipped the poor dog-eared paperback open with a sharp flick of one hand, sitting back. “Apparently. Still, it sure would be something if you found the last one, huh?” He threw this out airily enough, but she caught his sideways look as he turned a page, quick and sharp and caustic, giving the lie to his blithe apology.

“From my shop, too. Imagine.”

Sarah shrugged, one hand already on the door, tugging her damp knit hat straight on her frazzled hair and settling the weight of her pocketbook into a better position on her shoulder. She was pretty sure he was having some kind of joke at her expense, but she had no idea what it was and she didn't care, either. It wasn’t as if she would ever be setting foot inside this shop ever again- not in this lifetime, or the next, not if the entirety of the rest of the street was on fire.

As she cracked the door, the cold wind hit her like a slap in the face. It was a welcome dose of reality, drawing her mind away from this whole sour exchange to the scurry across the road in the sleet, the meal she had to invent out of basically a wish and a head of suspect broccoli, the torn comic-book pages she had hidden away to wrap Charlie’s present in while he slept, and a dozen other plans and cares.

“It’s just a lottery,” she said. “It’s a sucker’s bet.”

The shopkeeper smiled brightly after her as she left. It was a wide, brittle, insincere smile, and it fell off his face the moment the door shut at her back.

“Sucker’s bet, huh...”

As the bell over the door jangled itself into silence, he looked down at his book once more. Sarah might have been surprised, if she’d seen the absent, troubled way he closed and smoothed out the worn and creased cover, running his thumb gently over the colorful illustration scarred and faded with time.

Stowing the book carefully away under the counter, he let out a heavy sigh, and got to his feet.

“How right you are.”


End file.
